Few who undertake the transition from actor to activist manage to continue to do both well. Bethany Staelens, on the other hand, has always performed where it counts. By night, Staelens sings at the front a 19-piece big band, but once the footlights fade and the next day dawns, she can be found at the [...]

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When a veteran leaves a branch of the armed forces, it is often seen as a time to get on with the business of living. But for military veterans, the transition to civilian life is not always easy. That’s where Thomas Kuljam comes in. As director of UW Tacoma’s Veterans Incubator for Better Entrepreneurship (VIBE), [...]

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The moment Bruce McCormick was first moved to dance, the dancers hardly moved at all. “I remember just looking up and all the dancers all looked so tall and were smiling and I was completely in awe,” McCormick says, recalling the feeling of standing at the foot of the stage as a 7-year-old during a dress rehearsal [...]

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One of the first things Jennifer Cohen did on becoming athletic director of the University of Washington last May was shelve the hardware. The UW’s previous athletic director, Scott Woodward, had kept an array of championship rings displayed on a wall over a conference table in his office in Graves Hall. In making the space [...]

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If there is such a thing as a fifth act in the drama of American athletics, Elise Ray just opened hers to a standing ovation. This past April, Ray closed the books on her first season as head coach of UW Gymnastics, leading the GymDawgs to a program-record eighth-ranked finish nationally, ten spots ahead of the [...]

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Gene Woodard is a man on the move. The director of the Building Services Department at the University of Washington used to joke that he might be one of the few people who has been in every bathroom on the UW’s Seattle campus. “Then I realized the plumbers probably have me beat there,” he says. [...]

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Somewhere along the way to hauling yet another five-liter jug of water up to her second-floor room in a small village high in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, Kristi Straus decided enough was enough. She paused and looked around, reflecting on the community of subsistence farmers with whom she’d spent the past two years as a 22-year-old Peace Corps volunteer. “The people [...]

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Much as museums might make it seem, the past is not static. Its inhabitants no less frozen in amber or suspended in action poses as part of some done-up diorama than the scene outside your window at this very moment. Indeed, if there is one constant throughout history, it’s that humans move. In the process, [...]

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Upon earning her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Columbia University, what Wadiya Udell wanted most was to give back to first-generation students in a small liberal arts college atmosphere like the one she had experienced as an undergraduate at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. She had her eye on just the place. Perched high atop [...]

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If you want something done, do it yourself. But if you want something done right, do it together. That’s the driving ethos behind Zoe Barsness’ work as chair of the Faculty Senate, the legislative body of faculty consisting of 122 elected senators who, together with the president, formulate regulations and procedures that govern and guide [...]

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Will DePaolo studies bacteria, but his science goes viral. The associate professor of medicine’s videos exploring the bacterial science behind everyday objects have amassed millions of hits on BuzzFeed and led to appearances on The Today Show, but DePaolo, the director of the University of Washington’s new Center for Microbiome Sciences and Therapeutics (CMiST), says he [...]

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All librarians like a good challenge—Linda Di Biase perhaps more than most. Three days a week, Di Biase serves as the eBook and collaborative collection strategy librarian in the University of Washington’s Collection Analysis and Strategy Department. When she’s not building and analyzing library collections or helping PhD students access hard-to-find documents half-way around the [...]

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